Reading Herménégilde Chiasson, one is reminded that there are people in the world for whom art is oxygen, insulin, blood. The poems of this multidisciplinary Acadian (he is also a photographer, printmaker, filmmaker, and playwright, among other things) bear the marks of a sensitive, obsessive, and petulant Romantic in unromantic times. But Chiasson is no anachronism. Climates – his eighth book and the first to be translated into English – reveals a deep lyricism, but also the sweeping gaze of an artist completely in tune with the spirit, and the disquiet, of his time.

The book is shaped into four seasons: “Spring: A Journal,” formed of prose passages written over several decades in locales from Moncton to Paris; “Summer: News Reports,” composed in rhyming forms with the ironic presence of mythological figures in Acadian/Canadian haunts; “Autumn: Memoirs,” and “Winter: Legends.” The last two sections are, respectively, the book’s weakest and its most brilliant. “Autumn: Memoirs” is marked by an extravagant, but tiresome dejectedness, while “Winter: Legends” involves mysterious and elliptical narratives that draw from the vigorous tradition of Acadian folk myth.

At his best, Chiasson writes with imaginitive fury (his metaphorical range and depth captured seamlessly by translators Fred Cogswell and Jo-Anne Elder) to the end that Acadians be noticed, their culture validated – “that they would one day be more than a target, a hunting trip or a moosehead trophy gloriously nailed to a prefab wall.” Several poems suggest the uneasy chafing of English and French perceptions; others suggest a French culture stalled by a harsh climate and – alluding to the 1995 referendum – by a hesitation of collective will.

Chiasson occasionally lapses into a Byronic, confessional pose – a sighing artist-hero who won’t edit his despair. His indulgence, though, is largely forgivable because it’s integral to a fascinating persona. Climates is a compelling work by an artist who brings old-world nuance to a culture still struggling on the frontier.